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For those of you in the NYC area, DWNY will hopefully be having a viewing party on Sunday April 12, from around 6.30pm at a restaurant bar in Manhattan. I'll confim on the GE calendar when I have all the specifics!

All are welcome, and it should be a lot of fun, and its always a joy to watch Doctor Who together as a group, as attendees of previous events can attest!

If you're in the New York area come join us for Pub and Video meets - http://DWNY.org

that looks awful, derivitive and boring and a rip off of PITCH BLACK and the female theif companion seems like what they wanted to do with the McCoy season 27 had it happened with a female cat burglar. As I've suspected RTD has no ideas left in his head for DW

[Quote by: Chase] that looks awful, derivitive and boring and a rip off of PITCH BLACK and the female theif companion seems like what they wanted to do with the McCoy season 27 had it happened with a female cat burglar. As I've suspected RTD has no ideas left in his head for DW

Mmmm. or you could keep an open mind and judge it (good or bad) once you've actually seen the thing

One could say that judging ahead of time comes from the experience of holding off judgement on RUNAWAY BRIDE, VOYAGE OF THE DAMNED (well that wasn't THAT bad), and the NEXT DOCTOR "specials" and then actually seeing them.

Sorry I can't agree respectfully. Bad DW is not wanted. In fact, it is what made the show go away in the first place. I can't believe DW fans would not want a quality story that is in its own right entertaining, different and original (as it can be), and that it makes some logic in itself and as a nice aside it might make some sense in the overall scheme of things. If not, at least it tell a good story with characters we can care about and for a change NOT be linked to present day Earth at all if possible these days. BAD DW is worse than NO DW IMO.

In fact, to me they are the same thing.

DW is so capable of so much more than being mediocre, forced, poor, and badly written that we should demand stories that we can care about and people we can care about; not just "something for the holiday day". If the writers and producers cannot rise to the occasion and give us something akin to the entire first season (Bar the second Adam story), HUMAN NATURE, The Madam De Pompdour story, EMPTY CHILD, DOOMSDAY, even FEAR HER (but again notice it could be just a small story, it had to have a huge Olympic sub plot), the Sontaran story, and going back TALONS OF WENG CHIANG, FACE OF EVIL, HORROR OF FANG ROCK, GENESIS OF THE DALEKS (with almost no links to Earth at all), LOGOPOLIS, CASTROVALVA, KINDA, DELTA AND THE BANNER MEN, GREATEST SHOW IN THE GALAXY, POWER OF THE DALEKS, EVIL OF THE DALEKS, even THE INVASION, DALEK INVASION EARTH (remember this story was not afraid to be set in the future of Earth), and others, then why bother?

I take your point, but the problem is "bad" is so entirely subjective. A glance at your list of examples of "good" DW reveals the impossibility of pleasing everyone. I'm not sure there are many fans — and fewer casual viewers — who would consider bothThe Greatest Show in the Galaxy and "The Girl in the Fireplace" as comparatively equal in terms of quality.

All I really want from the show are people who understand the narrative art, and who are trying to make an original story that will resonate with the greatest number of viewers with each and every story. When they have occasionally missed the mark, as with "Voyage of the Damned", it's still been possible to see what the production team was trying to achieve. More to the point, it's possible to see that they told the story they basically wanted to tell; it just didn't happen to resonate with me. And the story, no matter what I might have thought about it, still pleased a large, series-sustaining audience of people.

What killed DW in the past wasn't strictly that it was "bad", but rather that its ambitions were unclear. More specifically, the JNT-led belief that Doctor Who was science fiction, coupled with his edict to hire largely inexperienced writers and his own lack of narrative skill, rather unsurprisingly led to arcane scripts that whittled the audience down to a small core of people desperate to believe change had to be coming sometime soon.

In the modern era, when we have "hiccups", all but the smallest cadre of fans (who generally hate New Who anyway), have the firm belief that the next episode will right the ship. And they're generally right. On average, most fans of the show seem to intensely like every other episode. That means that every episode of the series has its own group of loyal supporters, and that overall, the series is appealing to a widely varying audience.

RTD's major sin is occasionally over-reaching and trying to do too much with the format. By trying to remake DW as strictly science fiction, JNT had just the opposite problem. Of the two options, I'd much rather have the former. Ken and Louis have occasionally claimed that RTD's seasons have had a set pattern of present day story, followed by future story, then past story, then two part with major villain, and so on. And you can look at it that way if you wish. But you can also say that this guarantees, quite unlike the JNT era, that you'll get a wide variety of stories, even if they happen to occur in roughly the same order each year.

And this includes the so-called "holiday" themed story. I for one think there's still a utility to that. A story that demands relatively little of its audience's knowledge of DW continuity is still a good thing. It's a recruiting tool for the not-we. And RTD's batting average is still pretty fair as far as I'm concerned. I've really liked exactly half of them. Given a choice between holidays without the Doctor and holidays with him, I'll take my chances.

"I think of myself as ambitious in casting terms, and I know that Bonnie [Langford] has the potential to make the part totally unirritating . . ." — JNT, 1986

[Quote by: Chase] Sorry I can't agree respectfully. Bad DW is not wanted. In fact, it is what made the show go away in the first place.

Well, actually even that isn't strictly speaking true. It went away in the first place for many many things - but not totally due to a lack of quality. Because there was quality during the JNT era.

But there was also politicking at the BBC led by people who didn't like the show, or Sci-Fi in general, incredibly bad scheduling (linked to the 1st case), and an at odds production team who didn't do themselves any favours with their in-fighting, an interesting relationship between the production team and certain fans, and a producer who wanted to leave, but stayed so that the show didn't get cancelled.

The quality of the stories, while at times not good, was by no means the only reason.

If you're in the New York area come join us for Pub and Video meets - http://DWNY.org

[Quote by: Chase]I can't believe DW fans would not want a quality story that is in its own right entertaining, different and original (as it can be), and that it makes some logic in itself and as a nice aside it might make some sense in the overall scheme of things.

Yes - I'd like that. And guess what? I think I'm getting that, so thanks very much Russell for giving me plenty of fun and entertaining Doctor Who over the last 4 years. Can't wait to enjoy your final 4 hours - I'm sure they will fit the bill nicely too - starting this Saturday! Hooray!

And let's end the discussion there, so that this thread can stay focused on Planet of the Dead and how excited we are for it, and our views on it after we've seen it, rather than a one-man anti-RTD crusade!

If you're in the New York area come join us for Pub and Video meets - http://DWNY.org